Astrophotography preparation brings first-time success

Astrophotography consists of photographing the stars in some way but it is not the easiest subject for beginners. If you are anything like us, there’s not a lot of opportunity for dark skies and need to maximize precious time. However, a little preparation improves the success rate of the first session. We traveled to rural North Dakota but the conditions were less-than-ideal. Temperatures dipped to double digits below zero with a fierce and persistent wind that made it feel like 40 to 50 below.

Planning successful astrophotography shoots

The most important aspect to successfully capturing stars is preparation. Available resources include a multitude of apps and websites that help find the appropriate locations and times to produce the desired results. Astrophotography also brings additional gear and exposure considerations. Here are some of the best tips and lowest investment options that we found to help beginners get started.

Finding suitable times, locations and lighting conditions

Screenshot of Light Pollution Map for iOS

Many websites and apps guide photographers to the right times, locations, and lighting conditions for astrophotography projects. Though some come at minimal cost, free options produce the same results with a little extra work.

Darksitefinder.com works for desktop viewing and initial trip planning. It is also interesting to study the magnitude of light pollution across the world. A quick glance shows that the eastern United States and Western Europe contain few light pollution-free areas for astrophotography.

Light Pollution Map is an app available on both iOS and Android and uses GPS to display light pollution in the current location. LPM includes features such as “aurora borealis maps, meteor shower alerts, super moon alerts, lunar eclipse alerts, moon phases and info, aurora and magnetic field information, international space station tracker, and a lot more!”

The Photographer’s Ephemeris ($2.99 – $8.99 for apps, but free for desktop) helps visualize “how the light will fall on the land, day or night, for any location on earth.”

Starwalk ($2.49 – $4.99) offers real-time tracking, augmented reality, and works with Apple Watch. We’ll discuss some of these options in greater detail for future articles.

Proper equipment and camera settings

The photographer used a 50mm lens, which resulted in dotted trails because stars appear to move faster through longer lenses. Photo by Benjamin Pecka.

Essential and useful equipment for astrophotography

Screenshot of the Dark Skies app.

Since astrophotography deals with exposures into the tens of seconds, a sturdy tripod is required to stabilize the camera enough to capture stars.

While it’s not completely impossible to execute astrophotography with less capable gear, a camera with manual controls is essential for good results. For this article, we used a Nikon D7100.

A wide aperture lens helps cameras collect enough light to capture stars. Generally speaking, astrophotographers want to stay around f/2.8 but lenses that goes as wide as f/5.6 are also acceptable.

A shutter remote is extremely useful for more than nighttime and star photography, but the camera’s self-timer produces slower but similar results.

An astrophotographer might be able to get along without after their eyes adjust to low light, but a flashlight is extremely useful. Including additional lighting in the foreground also adds interest to the image when using a wide-angled lens.

Dark Skies is an app that quickly calculates how long of an exposure an astrophotographer can use to avoid star trails. It is available on iOS and Android. This can also be calculated manually by using the 500 rule. Multiply the lens’ focal length by the f-stop and then divide the product by 500 to find the number of seconds.

How to find proper settings to obtain correct exposure and focus

There are no hard and fast rules because shooting conditions are never the same, so building familiarity with nighttime photography does much to cultivate an intuitive sense. There are some additional tips that work to produce optimal results though.

Like with most nighttime photography, astrophotographers should use a combination of high ISO, wide apertures, and long shutter speeds. Using ISOs higher than 2000 increases noise, so avoid them whenever possible.

Always focus the lens on infinity to keep everything in focus. If the lens doesn’t have an indicator that makes it possible to set manually, focus on the farthest possible object during the daytime. Once that’s complete, set the focus modes on the lens and camera to manual. If the focusing ring moves easily, affix a piece of masking tape so that it doesn’t move during transport.

If it’s a feature of the lens or camera body, turn off image stabilization. Image stabilization tends to reduce the sharpness of stars.

Turn on long exposure noise reduction to reduce grain from using a high ISO, if it’s available on the camera.

Astrophotography is a complicated subject that can’t be fully covered in one article. However, there are some quick tips to use for processing. Considering growing interest in space exploration due to SpaceX and the X Prize Foundation, photopigs is excited to cover the topic again in the future.

Have you experimented with astrophotography? What were the results? What went wrong the first time? Did we miss any essential tips in this article? Let us know in the comments!

1 COMMENT

[…] Astrophotography takes a fair amount of dedication. Being middle aged, working a full-time job and living in the city doesn’t help matters when it comes to taking photos of stars and the Milky Way. So, I worked up a plan because preparation is the key to successful astrophotography sessions. […]

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